


\^ ij'^ 



ADDRESSES 



DELIVERED AT THE 



INAUGURATION 



THE REV. JOHN GORDON. D. D., 



Pre^dent of How&^rd University. 



^ 



WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 
Wednesday, March the Thirtieth, 

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND POUR. 



ADDRESSES 



DELIVERED AT THE 



THE REV. JOHN GORDON. D. D., 



President of Howa^rd University. 



WASHINGTON. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 
Wednesday, March the Thirtieth, 

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR. 






t 




PRESS OF 

Haywobth Publishing House, 
washington, d. c. 

\ 



The exercises of the afternoon opened in the Andrew Rankin 
Memorial Chapel on the University Campus at 2.30 p. m., the 
Rev. Tennis S. Hamlin, D. D., President of the Board of Trustees, 
in the Chair. After prayer by the Rev. Francis J. Grimke, D. D., 
the following addresses were delivered : 

Dean Is&ac Clark, D. D. 

Dean Isaac Clark, D. D., for the Theological Department, said : 
It was November 17, 1866 — Monthly Concert night of the First 
Congregational Church in Washington, D. C. The leader of the 
meeting was Rev. Dr. C. B. Boynton, pastor of the church. The 
theme of the evening was the duty of the country and of the 
church to the Freedmen lately made free by the Lincoln proclama- 
tion. Mr. Henry A. Brewster spoke of a great missionary society, 
like the American Board, as the need of the day for the evangeli- 
zation of those who had lately been freed. Rev. Benjamin F. 
Morris, then in Government service, told of the surprise and de- 
light with which he had listened that afternoon to an examina- 
tion in theological studies of a half dozen colored young men — 
students in what was then known as Wayland Institute, a school 
having only a single teacher. In closing his remarks he expressed 
the wish that the day would come when a theological school would 
be established by the Congregational Church in Washington, D. 
C. To this Rev. D. B. Nichols responded with instant interest 
and springing faith, "Why not now?" This was the good seed 
sown in good ground which sprang up, and has borne fruit an 
hundred fold in the multiplied departments and manifold and 
beneficent activities of Howard University. 

On the following Thursday a conference was held and a com- 
mittee was appointed to prepare a plan of action, A week later a 
plan was presented recommending the opening of a night school 
to begin with, and that three chairs of instruction be established 
— one on Evidences of Christianity and Biblical Interpretation, a 
second on Biblical History and Geography, and a third on Anato- 
my and Phisiology in their special relations to Hygiene. The plan 



was adopted and Rev. E. W. Robinson was appointed to the 
first chair, Rev. D. B. Nichols to the second, and Dr. Silas Loomis 
to the third. 

So began the school which was to be called a Theological In- 
stitute, the aim of which was the education of colored youth for 
the ministry. Other conferences followed and other counsellors 
were called in, with the result that the original plan was en- 
larged until it included a Theological Department, a Normal De- 
partment, a Medical Department, a Law Department, a Colleg- 
iate Department, an Agricultural Department, and a Preparatory 
Department. Thus enlarged in plan, and under the name of "The 
Howard University," the institution was incorporated by Act of 
Congress in March, 1867. 

But the Theological Department, first in the thoughts of the 
founders, was last in formal organization, though as early as De- 
cember, 1867, arrangement was made to give instruction to stu- 
dents in the academical courses who had the ministry in view, in 
Biblical Interpretation and Evidences of Revelation. Not till 
October, 1871, was a regular and full theological course provided. 
The Theological Department is now nearing the end of its thirty- 
third year of life and labor. 

What has the Department stood for through these years? 

First. Not for denominationalism. The students have always 
been of many denominations, and the faculty never all of one de-. 
nomination. And yet it has not stood for disloyalty to denomina- 
tions, but for the larger loyalty to Christ, which takes denomina- 
tions up into a happy fellowship and a helpful co-operation. 

Second. Let it be confessed that the Department has not stood 
for highest scholarships and this of necessity, for, as a rule, those 
who have come to the Department have come without the scholar- 
ship which a college course might give them — many of them with- 
out the attainments of a preparatory course. So comling in they 
could not go out accomplished scholars. 

Third. It has not stood for scholarship alone and this of choice. 
Scholarship alone, however full and accurate, is no sure pledge of 
success in the ministry. Some fine scholars have been poor 
preachers, and poorer pastors. Consecration is as important as 
erudition. A rude sword in the hand of a determined patriot is 
more effective than a Damascus blade in the hand of an indiffer- 
ent citizen. Still it is well to temper and sharpen the rude 
sword. With knowledge, consecration becomes the more effective. 

Fourth. So believing, the Department has stood for opportu- 
nity and help to recognized preachers and chosen pastors, who 
have felt their need of a better equipment for service and have 
been eager to use the chance and advantage put within their 



reach. Many such, after full or partial courses of study, have 
gone forth to be better teachers and safer leaders of their people. 

Fifth. More generally the Department has stood for the prac- 
ticable with a push toward the ideal. It has stood for what is 
practicable in that it has begun with students where they were in 
attainment and has kept in view the fields where they were to be 
in service. Education is a relative thing. Relatively, one may be 
well or poorly educated. It depends upon where he is and with 
whom he is brought into comparison. In the Black Belt one 
may be a well educated man ; in Boston, a poorly educated man. 
Place and comparison make the difference. Keeping in mind the 
relativity of education, the Department has always stood for an 
educated ministry. It has stood for higher education — higher in 
the attainments actually made by the students, higher still in the 
ideals, plans, and purposes formed to be worked out in after 
years ; always for an education higher than that of the people they 
were to serve and fitting them for natural and wise leadership in 
things moral and religious. 

The Department has stood for the practicable in its special aim 
and method. Specialization in education is the order of the day. 
Not general acquisition and discipline, but special knowledge and 
training are sought. Not the soul's possibilities of large develop- 
rdent and culture, but the world's demand upon the soul for 
efl'ective service — that is the key to the present system of educa- 
tion. Men are to be taught and drilled to do something, and to do 
that something well. One who is not an accomplished scholar 
may be a good specialist. The work of the minister is a special 
work. Special training may fit him for it. The Department has 
stood for special training for special work. So doing it has stood 
for an ethical Christianity which holds men to the faithful doing 
of the duties of this life while rejoicing in the hope of a better life 
to come. It has stood for character as even better than learning 
and an element of more lasting and beneficent power. It has 
stood for a scriptural religion, believing that the scriptures give 
us an authoritative revelation of God, and that accuracy, facility, 
and loving eagerness in getting at, getting out and giving out the 
meaning of God's word are the best means to that best end — the 
winning of men to Christ and the training of them up in Christ. 
It has stood for study and drill along many lines, but all converg- 
ing upon this result — power to save souls — we are not afraid of 
the old-tinte phrase — power to save souls, and to extend the 
Kingdom of Heaven on the earth. 

Standing for the practicable, we believe that the Department 
has in good measure achieved the practical. It has taught and 
trained men, and sent them out to be the leaders of their people 



6 

— leaders of tlieir people in that they are ahead of them, jet not so 
far ahead as to snap the cords of love and sympathy without which 
there can be no effective leadership. If conceit of knov^^ledge and 
sense of superiority take the place of humility of spirit and long- 
ing to help and bless others, then the educated minister becomes 
the useless minister. 

The Department has given impulse and direction to good nat- 
ural powers and sent out men to carry forward their own educa- 
tion, until their ability and worth have been recognized and hon- 
ored by promotion to places of responsibility and distinction. 
More than 200 have been -graduated from the Department and 
have done good service in this and in other lands. A large num- 
ber — how m'any I can not say — have received instruction for 
longer or shorter periods and have gone forth not taking diploma 
or certificate, yet themselves the better living epistles to be read 
of their fellow-men. At present in day and evening classes 75 
are receiving instruction. The evening class of recent date 
was organized in response to an earnest desire of young men, 
engaged in work through the day, to pursue a course of 
study wiiich would fit them for more effective service in and 
for the churches. I have said that the Department has stood for 
tlie practicable and for a push toward the ideal. It has stood for 
the latter, not by exclusion of all but the brightest and best 
taught, but by raising the conditions of eligibility to graduation 
and by raising still higher the conditions of actual graduation to 
be attested by diploma or certificate. It has sought to send out 
better and better young men to the churches that it might receive 
better and better young men from the churches. ''Like people 
like priests." It is for the churches to set the standard of ac- 
ceptable ministerial service. In church, as well as in business, 
demand and supply will answer to each other. 

That our graduates are loyal to Howard is evidenced by an ac- 
tive Alumni Association maintained for a long period, and in re- 
cent years having its annual reunions and banquets, something 
which, I believe, is peculiar to this Department. 

What are our present needs? First, closer identification with 
the University carrying with it duty on the one hand and pro- 
Vision on the other; second, larger endowment with reference to 
better equipment and better service in the future ; third, young- 
men who feel that the best talents and attainments are only 
a fitting tribute to Him who has redeemed them and who offers 
to them the supreme honor of being co-workers with Him in 
building up the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. 



What our joy and hope? With grateful memories of those 
who have labored here in the past, with thankfulness to Him who 
is above all and whose favor has been the sunshine of the insti- 
tution in by-gone years, we turn with glad expectancy to our new 
President, whose zeal will prompt, whose wisdom will plan, and 
whose strength will be given for the uplift and advancement of 
the University in all its interests and in all its Departments. 



Dean Robert Reyburn, M. D. 

Dean Robert Reyburn, M. D., for the Medical Department, said: 

The Medical Department of Howard University, like all the 
other Departments of the . University, has been an outgrowth of 
our great Civil War. 

During the closing years of this gigantic struggle, from 1861- 
1865, immense numbers of the colored people, who had so recently 
been emancipated from slavery, filed for refuge to the Union 
lines. 

This was especially the case on the frontiers of lines occupied 
by the Union Armies. All along the great Mississippi Valley and 
in the Southern States, wherever the Union Armies penetrated 
vast numbers of these people aggregated. 

The condition of these people was pitiful in the extreme. Un- 
accustomed to care for themselves, and ignorant of the simplest 
means of caring for the health of themselves and their children, 
diseases of all kinds were rife among them and threatened their 
extermination. 

The sympathies of General Grant, at that time in command 
of all the Union Armies, were awakened to their dreadful condi- 
tion, and during the closing years of the war he called to take 
charge of caring for the spiritual, moral, and temporal welfare 
of these people, Gen. John Eaton, whom you all know and love so 
well. 

After the close of the war, in 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau was 
organized and placed in charge of Gen. O. O. Howard, the pa- 
triot and philanthropist. The Freedmen's Bureau aided very 
greatly in the uplifting of the colored people of the South, but fi- 
nally closed its operations in 1872. 

The one who now addresses you was on duty in the Medical 
Department of the Freedmen's Bureau from its organization to its 
closure, and from 1867 to 1872 was its chief medical officer. 

During the latter vears of the Bureau's existence his chief 



9 

r 

duty was the closing up of the various Bureau Hospitals, and the 
turning of them over to the various Southern States as fast as 
they became reconstructed and assumed the functions of Civil 
Government. 

In most cases this was done by donating to the various South- 
ern States the hospitals as they stood, with all their appliances 
for caring for the sick, on the condition that they would in the 
future care for the patients who were inmates of the hospitals. 
This was done successfully in all cases except in the cities of 
Richmond, Va., and Washington, D. C. Both of these cities de- 
clared their inability to care for the large number of patients on 
their hands, and to provide for them. 

Freedmen's Hospital, Washington, D. C, was built in 1868 for 
their reception. The operations of the Medical Department of 
the Freedmen's Bureau were on a much more extended scale than 
is generally supposed. During the years 1866-1868 there were in 
operation 56 Bureau hospitals and 48 Bureau dispensaries. One 
hundred and thirty-eight physicians were employed by the Bu- 
reaus, who visited the sick, not only at the hospitals, but at the 
camps and settlements where they had been assembled by the 
results of the war. The total number of patients (freed people)' 
under treatment from 1865 to June 30, 1872, was 430,466. 

On March 2, 1867, Howard University received its charter, and 
for the first time in the history of the United States a university 
was organized which opened its doors to all who applied for ad- 
mission, without regard to sex, color, or race. 

The Freedmen's Hospital referred to as having been built in 
Washington, D. C, in 1868 was the foundation stone on which 
the Medical Department of the University was built. 

The Medical Department of any university that has not a hos- 
pital at its command is utterly helpless, for it must be obvious 
that it is impossible to perfectly instruct students in the science 
of medicine unless they can see patients afflicted with the various 
diseases and can also witness their proper treatment. 

The Medical Department of Howard University was organized 
in 1868, and the lectures have been continuously given during the 
past thirty-six years. 

The first class of medical students, 1868-69, numbered eight, and 
I well remember one snowy and stormy night, that only one mem- 
ber of the class was present to listen to our instructions. There 
were four of the medical professors, however, and we each filed in 
and inflicted our lecture of an hour upon that unfortunate stu- 
dent. 

We commenced with the Medical and Pharmaceutical Depart- 



10 

ments; in 1S81, the Dental College was added, and in 1893 the 
Training School for Nurses was organized. 

It should not be forgotten that the term of instruction has of 
late years progressively been lengthened. At this time in the 
Medical Department four annual terms of seven months each are 
required for graduation by all students in medicine and dentistry. 

The Medical Faculty, at the beginning of the present session, 
1903-04, believed it would be for the best interests of the Univer- 
sity to change the tuition from the night hours to day instruction. 
Accordingly the freshman class of this year will receive their lec- 
tures and practical work during the day. Each succeeding year 
will add one more class in day work until the entire course be- 
comes a day course. 

In the recent change of the Medical Department from night to 
day school it was feared that the number of students would be 
greatly diminished, but it has not had that efifect, as the enroll- 
ment of 110 new students this year shows. 

It might not be amiss to state that since the opening of the 
Medical Department in 1868 to the present time there have been 
863 graduates, about 500 of whom have been colored. These grad- 
uates have come from the three Americas, Europe, Asia, and 
Africa, as well as the islands of the sea ; hence they may be said 
to be scattered all over the world. 

Our graduates everywhere are doing well, and in order to show 
how they stand in this District I wish to mention the following 
fact : An examination recently took place for the position of 
inspector for the colored schools, and the following persons were 
appointed, as result of the report of the Civil Service Commis- 
sion: Doctors, J. W. Mitchell, W. J. Bush, and U. J. Daniels; 
and Dr. I. H. Lamb, the only woman appointed as inspector in the 
white schools of the District of Columbia, all graduates of How- 
ard University Medical Department. 

" The outlook of the Medical Department is very bright. With 
its magnificent hospital, soon to be erected, the enlargement of 
the curricula of the Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutic Colleges, 
there is no reason why it should not be one of the best medical col- 
leges in the world. 



11 



Dean B- F. Leighton, LL. D. 

Dean B. F. Leigliton, LL.D., for the Law Department said: 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: — The Law Department 
of Howard University was organized in the fall of 1868, but did 
not open for students until January 6, 1869. John M. Langston, 
Esq., was its first dean. The Hon. A. G. Riddle was associated 
with him as a lecturer and professor. The term opened with 6 
students, and numbered 22 at its close. In the following year, 
Henry D. Bean, Esq., was added to the faculty. The students of 
that year numbered 46. 

When the school organized, and for a number of years there- 
after, it held its sessions in the law rooms of the main building 
of the University. This was found to be inconvenient to faculty 
and students, and rooms were secured in the building occupied 
by the Second National Bank on Seventh street, where the school 
held its sessions for a number of years. It then moved to a hall 
in the Lincoln Hall, at the corner of Ninth and D streets, where 
it remained until the building was destroyed by fire in 1887, when 
the University purchased its present law building on Fifth street, 
opposite the City Hall. 

Professor Langston remained with the school until the close of 
the schoolyear of 1874. The years following 1870 were years of 
embarrassment for the University, in which the Law Department 
suffered more than the other departments of the University. At 
times the school was suspended, or had a nominal existence, or 
languished under a single professor, with eight or ten students. 
•This state of things continued until the close of the school year 
of 1880-81. I was appointed dean of the Department that year, 
and had associated with me, Hon. A. A. Birney, as lecturer and 
professor. The curriculum covered a period of two years, and 
there were 7 students in all the classes, 5 of whom graduated at 
the commencement of that school year. Since that time, the stu- 
dent-body has gradually increased, till last year it numbered 90, 
and this year 88 students are enrolled. The faculty has been in- 



12 

creased from time to time till there are now 7 professors, besides 
occasional lecturers on special subjects. The curriculum has been 
increased from two to three years, and the courses of study are 
similar to that of the other law schools in the qity. 

Congress has for a number of years appropriated a small sum 
of money with which to purchase law books for the use of the 
Department; this money has been expended in purchasing care- 
fully selected modern text-books and reports. There have been 
several donations of valuable law books from private individuals. 
The school has now a good working law library, sufficient in size 
and variety for its present needs. The library should be kept up, 
as is now being done, by the purchase annually of such current 
reports as are needed to keep the sets of reports now owned by 
the University up to date, and by purchasing important text- 
books as they are published from time to time. 

The school is in great need of an additional lecture hall ; there 
are now two classes in session at the same time, every evening 
through the week days of the school year. 

One of these classes meets in the library room. The floor space 
of this room is inadequate to accommodate the students usually 
in attendance. This space has been encroached upon by book- 
cases and tables, for the convenience of students using the li- 
brary. Another suitable lecture hall might be obtained by build- 
ing another story to the present lecture hall. Either this or an- 
other building will be a necessity in the near future. 

No effort has been made in the past quarter of a century to 
bring students to the school ; such growth as has been made has 
been brought about by the normal development of the class from 
which our students are largely drawn, and by the good "^ords 
spoken for the school by the graduates scattered in different parts 
of the country. The numbers could be greatly increased by a 
judicious expenditure of printer's ink, if that were thought de- 
sirable. The practice of the law has so many attractions for the 
youth of our country that little effort is required to bring stu- 
dents to the school in such numbers as are amply sufficient for 
the public needs. 

All but four of the Presidents of the United States have been 
men educated for the bar. Two-thirds of the law-making bodies, 
national and State, are drawn from the same profession. The 
administration of the law has been, and is, and must of necessity 
continue to be, wholly in their hands. The great charters estab- 
lishing and securing our liberties have been written almost en- 
tirely by lawyers. 

The profession of the law is a republic in which the subjects 
are all equal; in which the prizes are only for the industrious, 



13 

for the honest, and for the capable; in which social position or 
money count for nothing ; in which, more than in any other occu- 
pation, a man's standing is what he makes it, and what he himself 
is. Is it any wonder, then, that the youth of our country seek a 
career at the bar in redundancy of numbers? Not all who are in 
the schools expect to engage actively in the profession of the law ; 
many seek a legal education for the mental training, and for the 
practical benefit attained by some knowledge of the law. No other 
course of study is better adapted to qualify one for an active busi- 
ness career than that of the law. Some knowledge of contracts, 
of the domestic relations, of civil rights and injuries, and, above 
all, some knowledge of our civil institutions, our rights of per- 
son and property, and how secured to us, are important to every 
citizen, in whatever avocation of life he may be. 

Mr. President, I congratulate you on the splendid opportunity 
afforded to you for doing good — for scattering among our peo- 
ple the seeds of civil and religious liberty for the strengthening 
of the foundations of our country. 



14 



Dean F. W. Fairfield. D. D. 

Dean F. W. Fairfield, D. D., for the Academic Departments^ 
said: 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — When I saw the pro- 
gramme accompanying the invitations to the inaugural cere- 
monies, and observed the list of distinguished personages as- 
signed to this afternoon, I was reminded of a story which I used 
to hear when I was a boy. A parishioner, so the story ran, came 
to his pastor on one occasion with the request that he might 
change his seat at church. When the reason was asked for, the 
man hesitated, but finally said : '^I sit at the back of the church,^ 
and up in front there are three old maids with their mouths wide 
open and they get all the best of the sermon, and by the time it 
comes to me it is plaguy poor stuif !" 

Do not look too closely for the application of this story.: 
Neither parables nor stories should be made to "go on all fours," 
Even the after-dinner stories of distinguished Senators will not 
alvv^ays bear too minute inspection as to their relevancy. Do 
you wonder, however, that when I expected to be preceded "by 
Commissioner Harris, President Crogman, President Gilman, and 
President Needham, it occurred to me that all that would remain 
for me to do would be to rise, make my bow and sit down again ? 

I have the honor to represent the four Academic faculties — the 
College of Arts and Sciences, the Teachers' College, the Commer- 
cial Department, and the Preparatory Department. It is ob- 
viously impossible for me, in the time allotted, to give a history 
of the origin and growth of the several Departments. I prefer 
to deal with present conditions. The College of Arts and Sci- 
ences, having recently adopted the so-called ''Group System," 
offers four years of thorough training, with or without the classic 
languages, leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. The 
Teachers' College has courses of two years and four years, re- 
spectively, affording, with its practice school, ample preparation 
for teaching in grade and secondary schools. The four-years 



15 

course leads to the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy. The Com- 
mercial Department, recently organized, proposes to fit its stu- 
dents, graduates from secondary schools, by a three-years course 
of study, for the successful pursuit of business and the practical 
affairs of life. The Preparatory Department, the secondary 
school of the University, has courses of four years, which fit for 
the higher departments. Graduates have gone from it to some of 
the best colleges in the country. The University is prepared to 
take a boy into the practice school at five years of age and give 
him, in its Academic Departments, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen 
years of instruction. If professional courses be added he can 
spend eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years under its fostering care. 

On this auspicious occasion, when the honored gentleman is be- 
ing formally inducted into the ofiice, the duties which he has per- 
formed so ably and successfully for many months, among the 
many things on which the Academic faculties felicitate them- 
selves, two stand out conspicuously. The one is of very great im- 
portance; the other, of transcendent importance. We congratu- 
late the Board of Trustees, because they have called to the Presi- 
dency a man of experience, not alone in affairs, not merely in the 
pastoral ofBce, but a man of academic experience and training; 
a man to whom educational propositions can be presented, with 
the confident expectation that he will receive them appreciatively, 
and decide upon them with wisdom. It goes without saying, that 
this is an extremely valuable attribute of a university president; 
but boards of trustees have not always had the wisdom to make 
such a selection. 

But more important still to us is the firm belief that President 
Gordon sympathizes most heartily with that for which Howard' 
University has stood in the past, stands to-day, and, God grant it ! 
shall always stand — educational opportunity. We have no quar- 
rel with industrial education. Not every boy or girl, of any class 
or condition, should seek a college training. But we have a 
quarrel, and shall always have a quarrel, with those who 
would limit educational opportunity to industrial training. 
The constituency to which the open doors of Howard Uni- 
versity have appealed most strongly in the past, and to 
which they will probably appeal most strongly in the future, 
needs leaders; not one great leader alone, nor half a dozen, but 
leaders in every State, in every city, in every hamlet. Shall these 
be ''blind leaders of the blind?" or shall the leadership be sane 
and conservative? I know of nothing which will secure such lead- 
ership, save education of mind and heart. And this education 
must be offered alike to all who are prepared to receive it. 



16 

In behalf of the Academic faculties, allow me to repeat their 
congratulations on the accession of President Gordon. I have 
spoken earnestly, because I have spoken from the very depths of 
my convictions; and, however brief and imperfect the utterance 
has been, I trust that the verdict will not quite be that which 
not infrequently has been rendered on similar occasions: "He 
had nothing to say—and he said it.'' 



17 



President Crogman, of Clark University. 

Bresident Crogman, of Clark University, Atlanta, Ga., said: 
I bring tou to-day most hearty greetings from the far South, 
from Georgia, the Empire State of the South, from Atlanta, the 
Gate City of the South, the city of large ambitions, the city of 
colleges and schools. Clark University sends to Howard Univer- 
sity her warmest congratulations and good wishes. Nor need 
I assure you that we have in you, as in all institutions of a 
similar character, a deep and an abiding interest, such an in- 
terest as one division of an army would naturally and reasonably 
have in the welfare of another ; for you and we are representatives 
of a common cause, we are engaged in a common work, a work 
of transcendent importance, a work that is to determine in large 
melasure what one-seventh of this country's population shall be, 
and what shall be its relations to the other six-sevenths. That 
this is still the burning question before the American public, the 
question that will not down, the question that, like Aaron's ser- 
pent, swallows up all the rest, is, alas; only too apparent. Pul- 
pit, press, and platform, learned societies, legislative bodies, and, 
worst of all, the mere political adventurer, the man of crude 
tastes and brutal instincts, who, in the language of Coleridge, 
would ^'handle a truth he was required to receive as he would 
handle an ox he w^as required to purchase,- ' can find no subject so 
fascinating, so tempting for discussion. As a consequence, we 
are kept forever in the public eye, and the country forever in a 
state of unrest. 

That some good may indirectly result from this continued 
agitation I am not fully prepared to deny. Yet very much of it 
reminds me of that fable in i^esop in which a boy is represented 
as having fallen into the river, and on the point of drowning 
when a man appears on the scene, to whom the boy cried lustily for 
help. The man, however, began to administer a lecture to the 
boy, and to rebuke him for his recklessness and indiscretion in 
approraching too near the w^ater. "But," cried the little fellow,^ 



18 

"help me first, and you may reprove me afterward." Evidently 
service has always been regarded as of more value than mere 
talk. Fortunately for us and for the whole country, during the 
last forty years while some have been speculating and theorizing 
with reference to the capabilities of the Negro, while they Jiave 
been zealously seeking exact knowledge with reference to the ca- 
pacity of his cranium and the weight of his brain, others, per- 
haps a smaller, certainly a less pretentious class, have been using 
their best endeavor to furnish us needed help and stimulus, and 
to draw us, as it were, out of the deep and dark waters into 
which, however, we had not fallen by any recklessness or indis- 
cretion of our own, but into which we had been ruthlessly thrown 
by the inordinate greed of our fellow men. 

This school planted here at the capital of the nation, a signifi- 
cant fact, is a mute but tangible expression of Christian faith 
and sympathy and love. It was founded, as I understand, very 
largely through the efl'orts and endeavors of a Christian soldier, 
who, wherever he is, and may he be happy wherever he is, is wear- 
ing an empty sleeve, at once an evidence of valor and a sad re- 
minder of those cruel days that tried men's souls and mutilated 
their bodies. Nothing in the remarkable career of General How- 
ard will reflect such lasting glory upon his name as the fact that 
after perilling his life for the preservation of the Union and the 
ircedom of a race, he so early turned his thought and energies 
toward providing the means by which that race might be led 
forth into the enjoyment of a still larger liberty, and made loyal 
and useful citizens of a still more glorious Union. 

But I am reminded just here that we are living not in the 
middle of the nineteenth, but in the beginning of the twentieth 
century. Forty years have brought about changes. It would be 
strange, if they had not. Some are now seriously questioning 
the wisdom of a college training for one class of American citi- 
zens. They claim that it utterly unfits them for their proper 
sphere in life. They insist that they should be taught only the 
merest handicrafts. Not very long ago the president of a repu- 
table college, a man with the inherited intelligence of centuries, 
declared himself opposed to the technical training of Negroes in 
the useful and industrial arts, as that, he averred, would bring 
them into dangerous competition with white artisans. And so 
we have to-day, fortunately or unfortunately, the strange, the 
very strange spectacle, of two systems of education arrayed one 
against the other, the so-called higher and the so-called industrial. 
I will be frank enough to admit in this august presence that I 
have never been able to determine wdth any degree of satisfac- 
tion to myself just what is high and what is low in education. 



19 

These distinctions must surely be relative rather than absolute. 
Sometimes when I have stood in a kindergarten, and watched an 
efficient, up-to-date teacher sowing by new methods the precious 
seed of knowledge in the virgin soil of those young minds, I have 
felt that there I was in the presence of the higher education. 
Certainly it is higher compared with the instruction given when 
I was a child. With reference, then, to the high and low in edu- 
cation, I am inclined to the view expressed by Cicero over two 
thousand years ago, namely, that "■all the arts appertaining to 
civilized life are united by a kind of common bond, and are con- 
nected as it were, by a certain relationship." 

As to industrial education, I, of course, believe in that. I be- 
lieve in it as much as he who believes in it most. I object, how- 
ever, to the special and sweeping emphasis placed to-day on the 
word "industrial ;" for I think that the man who during the week 
digs at Greek roots and sweats over commentaries to prepare a 
good sermon for the Sabbath is an industrious man. Neverthe- 
less, I believe in industrial education. I could wish that we had 
a Hampton or a Tuskegee in every Southern State, and, if I could 
have my way, I would make at least that part of education com- 
pulsory. There should be no idlers strolling the streets and high- 
ways that could be converted into self-supporting and useful 
citizens. I am happy to say that we have some manual training 
at Clark University, and have had more or less since 1880, and 
while we are not a trade school, but emphasize the college work 
and hold up college ideals, yet we have furnished many instruc- 
tors for the purely trade schools of the south. A young man 
trained in our schools — poor fellow, he died last spring — was for 
nine years, or up to the time of his death, foreman of blacksmith- 
ing at Tuskegee. The present foreman of the painting department 
at Tuskegee, a man who has been long in the service of that insti- 
tution, received his training with us, while the present matron of 
the boarding hall at Tuskegee, admitted to be the most efiflcient 
they ever had, a woman that has held her position for many 
jears, was furnished to Tuskegee by Clark University. From 
these citations and others that might be made you will readily see 
that we at Clark do not only believe in manual training, but that 
the training given by us must have been thorough; for our stu- 
dents have gone out into the world workmen that need not to be 
ashamed. 

Yet we would have it distinctly understood that we cherish col- 
lege ideals, and are endeavoring to realize them. We believe 
in manual training as a jjcirt of every man's education. We do 
not, however, agree with extremists who would reduce man to sL 
crude piece of mechanism. We do not agree with the recently 



20 

elected principal of a trade school, who announced the policy of 
his school to be a "bread and butter policy," and added that "it 
is of infinitely greater importance for a man to be able to earn 
his bread than to be able to measure the distance from the earth 
to the sun." To this we would reply both yes and no. It depends 
altogether upon what sort of man he is. Yes ; if he is a man made 
to live by bread alone. But we are assured by the highest auth- 
ority that man was not made to live by bread alone. Certainly 
we have known, and do know many of that sort, and for these we 
plead. Nay, I submit still further that any Negro who could to- 
day measure with accuracy the distance from the earth to the 
sun would do more to lift the whole race in the estimation of the 
civilized world than the achievments of ten thousand ordinary 
bread winners. The capabilities of a race are measured not by its 
mass, but by the achievements of its individuals. Who can think 
of the English-speaking race without thinking of Shakespeare, 
Bacon, Newton, Milton, Burke, Chatham, Gladstone, Tennyson, 
Browning? We believe, then, in the higher, nay, in the highest 
education for every human soul who desires it and is capable of 
taking it. For who has a right to limit the aspirations of the 
mind or set bounds to that which God has created for indefinite 
expansion ? 

''The office of the scholar," saj'S Emerson, "is to cheer, to raise, 
and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances." 
Was there ever a people who needed more to be cheered, to be 
raised, and especially to be guided by showing them facts amidst 
appearances — was there ever a people, I say, who needed such 
service more than the Negro people of this country to-day? Where 
now, I ask, shall they look for leaders to render such service, 
where shall they look for the scholars of the race, if not to insti- 
tutions of this kind? In spite of sneer and criticism and cant, it 
would be difficult to overestimate the influence for good of the 
men and women sent into the field within the last forty years by 
these sohools. Just three weeks ago I sat down to supper in 
Atlanta with fourteen Negro college graduates. Several more 
were expected who did not come. At that table Harvard was 
represented by two, Yale by one, Brown by one, Boston University 
by one, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Penn- 
sylvania each by one. The others were about evenly divided be- 
tween Fisk and Atlanta. And all these men are regularly em- 
ployed, holding responsible positions as professors in the schools, 
pastors, physicians, and in Government service. 

About seven years ago while travelling in the Southern and 
Southwestern States in the interest of the Cotton States and In- 
ternational Exposition, I visited nineteen cities, my farthest point 



21 

south being San Antonio, Tex. In every one of these cities I 
found college-trained Negroes usefully employed, and invariably 
wielding the" dominant influence in the community. They are 
sought for and consulted on important matters, not only by people 
of their own race, but sometimes by people of the other race. 
There was never a grosser slander uttered than that which in re- 
cent years has represented the college-trained Negro as a loafer on 
the streets, hands in pocket, and nothing to do. The South will 
never know how much she owes to her educated Negroes. They 
are conservative forces in their several communities. Schooled 
into patience and self-control through long years of study and 
self-denial, they have gone forth to impress the same upon the less 
enlightened and, consequently, more excitable, of the race. Their 
example has been both salutary and inspiring. 

Some years ago complaint was made, even by the friends of 
the Negro, that he was too easily satisfied, that the mere smatter- 
ing of an education was all he cared to have. There has been a 
notable change in this respect. Never were so many Negro stu- 
dents found in the colleges of the country as are found to-day. 
Never were so many found pursuing post-graduate courses in the 
older and larger institutions of the North. Nay, some have even 
the ambition to drink at the fount of German learning. Hence 
they are found now at Berlin and Leipsic. Matthew Arnold in 
some one of his poems has said, substantially, "He who hath found 
himself hath lost his misery." It is a great day for a young man 
when he finds himself. It is a great day for any man when he 
finds himself, when he turns his eyes inward and discovers the 
possibilities and the energies latent within him. The colleges of 
this country have been helping the Negro to find himself, his 
better self. They have broadened his thought, enlarged his vision, 
inspired his heart, and given him an impetus towards all that is 
noblest and best in the world's civilization. 



24 

best preparation for study and gives the best opportunities to 
the student for acquiring useful knowledge, and gi.ves him that in- 
tellectual grip and poise that enables him at all times to use to 
the best advantages his intellectual powers, is serving to the larg- 
est degree the students who come to it, and the community and 
the nation in which it lives. 

There are special lines of university study that can be carried 
on with special advantage at the national capital, and while*every 
institution of learning must follow out its system of instruction 
as best it can in all necessary lines, yet in these days of specializa- 
tion even the university must specialize. The communities in 
which commercial and industrial activities exist and are carried 
to the highest degree of perfection offer to the student special 
advantages for study. Here at the national capital all questions 
pertaining to State building, the science of government, the social 
questions which determine in large degree our national life, all 
the problems which are involved in our complex form of govern- 
ment, the questions which arise and must be settled on account of 
the relations of this great nation with the nations of the earth, 
are being discussed and settled. Political science, national char- 
acteristics, and history are being constructed and made in this 
city. Institutions located here must not disregard these great 
opportunities, but should specialize along these lines. Here ought 
to be found the strongest men in political science, law and juris- 
prudence which is the bone and sinew of the Government, inter- 
national law, diplomacy and economics — and by economics I mean 
the production, movement, and trade in the products which make 
individual and national wealth. Here are the greatest opportuni- 
ties for the student to fit himself for the professions and callings 
which have to do directly with the administration of law and 
government, and the carrying on of those national and interna- 
tional activities so essentially a part of our national life. 

I trust, therefore, that in the development of this University 
these subjects may find a large and important place. 

One further thought. All who have read with care the sugges- 
tions of the first great President of the United States, that an in- 
stitution of learning should be established here, have been im- 
presed, no doubt, with the one great thought running through all 
that he said upon the subject, namely, that because of the loca- 
tion of the national Government in Washington and the coming 
here of strong men from all parts of the country, representing and 
creating the national life, thus bringing together representatives 
of every locality, every class and race and interest throughout the 
nation— students would have the best opportunity to form cor- 
rect views of the conditions existing and the opinions entertained 



by all the people. That in the discussion of these questions, while 
mingling together in student life the prejudices existing in many 
parts of the country against other classes and groups of men, 
would be in a measure softened, and men would go back from this, 
contact to a better and a stronger individual life, and through the 
individaul the communities in which they settle would be in- 
fluenced by their broader knowledge and learning, and a more sym- 
pathetic relation with men. We can not overestimate the value of 
this education which comes not from the institution itself, but 
from the environment of the institution, and this University, I am 
sure, has a rare opportunity to extend this wholesome influence 
to many men. 

Mr. President, in working out the plans and destiny of this 
great University, you have my heartiest sympathy, my cordial 
good will, my highest hopes, and best wishes for the success of 
your administration. 



24 

best preparation for study and gives the best opportunities to 
the student for acquiring useful knowledge, and gi.ves him that in- 
tellectual grip and poise that enables him at all times to use to 
the best advantages his intellectual powers, is serving to the larg- 
est degree the students who come to it, and the community and 
the nation in which it lives. 

There are special lines of university study that can be carried 
on with special advantage at the national capital, and while*every 
institution of learning must follow out its system of instruction 
as best it can in all necessary lines, yet in these days of specializa- 
tion even the university must specialize. The communities in 
which commercial and industrial activities exist and are carried 
to the highest degree of perfection offer to the student special 
advantages for study. Here at the national capital all questions 
pertaining to State building, the science of government, the social 
questions which determine in large degree our national life, all 
the problems which are involved in our complex form of govern- 
ment, the questions which arise and must be settled on account of 
ihe relations of this great nation with the nations of the earth, 
are being discussed and settled. Political science, national char- 
acteristics, and history are being constructed and made in this 
city. Institutions located here must not disregard these great 
opportunities, but should specialize along these lines. Here ought 
to be found the strongest men in political science, law and juris- 
prudence which is the bone and sinew of the Government, inter- 
national law, diplomacy and economics — and by economics I mean 
the production, movement, and trade in the products which make 
individual and national wealth. Here are the greatest opportuni- 
ties for the student to fit himself for the professions and callings 
which have to do directly with the administration of law and 
government, and the carrying on of those national and interna- 
tional activities so essentially a part of our national life. 

I trust, therefore, that in the development of this University 
these subjects may find a large and important place. 

One further thought. x\ll who have read with care the sugges- 
tions of the first great President of the United States, that an in- 
stitution of learning should be established here, have been im- 
presed, no doubt, with the one great thought running through all 
that he said upon the subject, namely, that because of the loca- 
tion of the national Government in Washington and the coming 
here of strong men from all parts of the country, representing and 
creating the national life, thus bringing together representatives 
of every locality, every class and race and interest throughout the 
nation— students would have the best opportunity to form cor- 
rect views of the conditions existing and the opinions entertained 



25 

by all the people. That in the discussion of these questions, while 
mingling together in student life the prejudices existing in many 
parts of the country against other classes and groups of men, 
would be in a measure softened, and men would go back from this 
contact to a better and a stronger individual life, and through the 
individaul the communities in which they settle would be in- 
fluenced by their broader knowledge and learning, and a more sym- 
pathetic relation with men. We can not overestimate the value of 
this education which comes not from the institution itself, but 
from the environment of the institution, and this University, I am 
sure, has a rare opportunity to extend this wholesome influence 
to many men. 

Mr. President, in working out the plans and destiny of this 
great University, you have my heartiest sympathy, my cordial 
good will, my highest hopes, and best wishes for the success of 
your administration. 



2G 



William T. Harris, A. M. LL. D. 

William T. Harris, A. M., LL. D., the Honorable Commissioner 
of Education of the United States, said : 

The nation has founded this University for the colored people 
of the United States. It is after a sort of symbol of the will of 
the people as a whole that there shall be an open road to educa- 
tion for all the people of the United States, no matter how hum- 
ble their circumstances and no matter of what race or people 
they trace their lineage. The spirit of our modern civilization de- 
mands that those who have enlightenment shall bring it to those 
who do not have it so that ail may participate; each one shall 
be given an opportunity to light his torch at the torch of civiliza- 
tion. 

The university stands at the head of the educational system. 
It is at the university that the. student comes to the sources of 
science, literature, and histor3^ He studies things in their gen- 
esis; he sees their elementary beginnings and the slow evolutioa 
of results in time; the unfolding of the great out of the small; 
and the final reaching of the good through the imperfect stages 
that are encountered on the way. 

The university expounds for its students the several sciences by 
which man has conquered nature and by which he has brought 
mankind into such intercommunication that each nation may 
profit by the experience of all nations, and each citizen profit hy 
the experience of all citizens. This is the definition of civilization^ 
that it organizes the social whole in such a manner that each per- 
son may profit by the experience of all, and the University real- 
izes this ideal of participation. 

To the colored students coming here from their distant homes in 
the Southern States of this Union, this institution of learning of- 
fers a course of study in the various branches of mathematics. 
Mathematics reveals laws that govern the existence and motion 
of bodies. It is one of the most important tools of thought by 
which man may conquer nature and make it a servant to his 



27 

will. In addition to mathematics this University gives the various 
sciences which expound the laws of matter and force and orgame 
life, vegetable and animal, and the inventions resulting from these 
sciences which have facilitated agriculture, mining, manufactur- 
ing, and commerce of the world. It gives access to the litera- 
ture of this nation and of other nations allied to it by identity 
of language. It goes further; it opens up the literature of the 
classic languages and of the languages of the Continent of 
Europe, the language of the Holy Scriptures and of the great 
poets of the race. 

It teaches various methods of study adapted to the several 
branches, each branch requiring a special mode of investigation. 

It is obvious that the Government in founding this institution 
expressed its will that each person born within the limits of the 
United States should have the opportunity to climb as high as 
his industry and native talents would permit him. 

And I desire to return again and again to this theme on this 
occasion. The greatest blessing that can come to the individual 
or the tribe or the pioneer is to be put in connection with a great 
civilization, for a civilization makes it possible for the social 
whole to serve the private individual. A world-commerce makes 
it possible for each locality to share in the production of the en- 
tire globe. Civilization enables it to see from day to day the spec- 
tacle of world history moving on its course, a divine panorama re- 
plete with the lessons of experience and Providential guidance. 
By association with a civilized community one gets the opportuni- 
ty to specialize his endeavor and to learn the mysteries of some 
trade or vocation by which he may assist at productive industry, 
and furnish something useful to all mankind. This is one of the 
two greatest privileges of civilization, that it enables one to con- 
tribute to the work of supplying some article of food, clothing and 
shelter, or some article or ornament or luxury, or some service 
to promote intercommunication and culture. It is another and 
greater privilege to be able to share in the counsels of the great 
seers and prophets of the race and learn their interpretations of 
the Divine will as expressed in Eevelation. 

What is the thought that is uppermost in your minds on this 
occasion? Your mind reverts, no doubt, to the evils of race 
prejudice and to the obstacles which they furnish to the career 
of an individual born of another race than the Caucasian. And 
I need not remind you of the one sure recourse which is open to 
the children of the other races, whether Asiatic or Malay, the 
North American Indian or the African. It is the gospel preached 
by one of the most gifted sons of the African race. You know 
Mr. Booker T. Washing-ton's solution to this problem. It is of 



so universal a character that it applies to the down-trodden of 
ail races, without reference to color. It comes home to each in- 
dividual and to each family and to each community. Make it 
your first object to contribute to the support of your civilization 
by increasing the amount of food, clothing, and shelter for your 
fellow-men of whatever color; and to increase your skill in some 
branch of manufacturing and to use it for, the market of the 
world; and to cultivate any special talent which nature has given 
you, should it be in teaching, or preaching, or surgery, or medi- 
cine, or in literature, or in art, for the good of the community in 
which you live. A life of meekness and self-sacrifice, a life of 
loyalty to the interests of civil order and productive industry, will 
sooner or later conquer all race prejudice. 

The service of the good of the community and the nation will 
shine all the brighter in the career of the proscribed race. It 
will appeal to the instinct deeply planted in our civilization, 
whose influence moves around the world in the great wave of 
public opinion, blessing the names of the benefactors of the 
race. 

The students of this University, the men and women who make 
a contribution to scholarship; who make contributions to a 
knowledge of the classics, or who make original investigations in 
chemistry, or astronomy, or in medicine; the graduates of this 
University who shall attain great skill in the treating of the 
diseases which flesh is heir to, or who shall attain great skill in 
some branch of surgery, or who shall make some great addition 
tiO useful knowledge, say in chemistry, or electricity, or in soci- 
ology or in pedagogy, will not only gain fame for themselves, but 
enise their race to be the more gratefully remembered. As your 
fompatriot Mr. Booker T. Washington has often told you, you 
'^ave in your hands the settlement of this race question. You 
caii conquer all opposition by deeds of great achievement, by 
using the knowledge which this higher education gives you for 
great services to yonr community and to the nation and by em- 
ploying the leadership which higher education gives you to inspire 
the rank and file who follow your leadership vrith the true spirit of 
service and self-forgetfulness which wishes no good to come t- 
itself except through the' good of the entire human race. 



29 



Evening' Addresses. 

Rev. Edward Everett Hale, D. D., LL.D. 

The exercises in the evening were held in the First Congrega- 
'tional Church, Tenth and G streets, at 8 o'clock. The Kev. Tennis 
S. Hamlin, D. D.. President of the Board of Trustees, in the 
chair. After prayer by the Rev. Oscar J. W. Scott, D. D., and 
music which, by the courtesy of the Hon. Secretary of the Navy, 
was furnished by the Marine Band orchestra, the Rev. Edward 
Everett Hale, D. D., LL.D., chaplain of the United States Senate, 
said: 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — In the limited time 
which I have any right to take in the ceremonies of to-day, I 
wish to speak of a liberal education — what it is and what it is 
not. 

John Adams, the second President, may be said to be in a cer- 
tain sense the founder of written constitutions of government. I 
think that the traces of his plans for the American Constitution 
may be still found in every constitution made by the old Thirteen 
Btates, and in most, if not all, of the later constitutions. 

He is known to be the author of the Constitution of my own 
State of Massachusetts. It was John Adams who made the state- 
ment that a republican government must provide for the liberal 
education of all its children. What did he mean by a liberal edu- 
cation? 

He did not mean a smattering of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew. 
He did not mean training in civil law or ecclesiastical law. No ; 
nor of ecclesiastical history or dogmatics. He did mean an ac- 
quaintance for everyone with the Language of his time and of 
his nation. He meant an acquaintance with the principles of its 
government; he meant a sufficient understanding of its scientific 
language for every voter to be able to understand and to discuss 
the interests of the day and his duties in the State. 



30 

In our time, for the young American tiiere are five great 
DUTIES as lie enters upon life and takes the privileges and duty of 
the ballot. They are these : 

First, this century is to build the railway from Hudson's Bay 
in the north to Patagonia in the south — a four-track railway 
which shall carry people as easily as they are now carried from 
New York to Chicago. 

Second, Europe has to build such a railway from the Baltic to 
the Pacific. It has to build such a railway from Cairo to the 
Cape. 

Next, and, returning to our own continent, the young American 
has upon him the great duty of conciliating the different races of 
mankind, black, white, red, yellow, and any other color, if there 
be any other color. 

Last, young America shares with all the world the duty of 
bringing in universal peace. Universal peace reigned in all the 
civilized world from the time of Paul two hundred jears. It is 
the duty of this century to restore it. 

Perhaps men do not remember that the preparation for these 
duties involves an education whollj^ beyond the instruction in the 
Three R's, reading, writing, and arithmetic, which are the spe- 
cialties of the common schools. Rather is it an absolute necessity 
following on that instruction, "a little learning is a dangerous 
thing." 

The Education of men and women who have passed boyhood and 
girlhood is of importance quite equal to the Instruction in the 
Three R's which is given in the public schools. I am to try in a 
few minutes to show that this is so. 

The writers on school education in the old world have not 
yet come so far. They do not yet understand it. They consider 
public education to be the instruction of the "masses," as they 
choose to call them. And on this side of the ocean it is only 
within a half century that the extreme importance of what we 
call the higher education, of what, oddly enough, the French call 
"secondary education," has been generally felt. 

The great Moseley Commission which visited us from England 
last year, to find out what the public education of America is, 
was much more interested with what we call common-school edu- 
cation than in that higher education which this University repre- 
sents, and which, whether our people know it or not, gives the 
direction to the whole system. 

To speak of the foundation of the whole matter, we are in this 
world to be fellow workers with God. He creates and He bids us 
create. He made the world and He sent us into the world to 
subdue it, and the broader the field for which man or woman is 



31 

prepared, the more divine will be the service which they can 
render. 

Now, when you speak to one of the feudal educators who come 
to us from countries still ruled by the Middle Ages, and w^hen 
Tou talk to them of Education, they are apt to talk to you of in- 
struction, which is a very different thing. They are thinking of 
the three R's — perhaps they go so far, as I said, that they are 
willing to teach a boy that there are four quarts in a gallon 
and eight pecks in a bushel. But they are very apt to stop 
there. Now, our business is not simply to teach facts to the 
child. It is to educate a man or a woman ; it is to change a boy 
-or a girl into a man or a woman. It is to make the man or the 
woman a fellow worker with the God of Heaven, that His king- 
dom nisij come and that His .will may be done. In this purpose, 
in the elevation of Instruction into Education, nothing is too 
large, nothing is too broad, nothing goes too deep, nothing soars 
too high. The State is bound to provide for each child born into 
the State the methods and opportunities for such education. 

We are gaining in this business. In John Adams's time we had 
4 colleges in the United States for 3,000,000 people. There are 
now more than 500 colleges and universities for 80,000,000 people. 
I suppose that in the year 1780, there graduated 100 young 
men with the first degree from the 3,000,000 people. Dr. Harris 
has favored me with a report of last year from which it appears 
that 18,000 people graduated in 464 colleges. That is to say, we 
have now 11(> colleges where we then had one and we now have 
ISO graduated annually where we then had one. 

The young men and young women occupied at these 500 col- 
leges, are to go out as leaders of this land. You gentlemen who 
direct this college, and people like you, scattered all over this 
nation, who are directing hundreds of other colleges, have to 
pray and work and watch that the time and money Which are 
bestowed upon them are bestowed with the direct purpose to serve 
in the larger enterprises of the nation. It is one of the central 
boasts of Yale College that the men who founded it, founded it, 
as they said, to bring up leaders for their State. I was charmed to 
find tile other day, that the same phrase was in the deed of be- 
quest of one of the earliest gifts to my own Alma Mater, to 
Harvard College. 

"How man can serve the State." You will give me the rest of 
the time which I am to occupy in some effort t6 rid these words 
of the interpretation which the older writers would have given 
them, w^hile I try to show how very wide is the field of research 
which w^ithin the hundred years past, if you please, has been 
thrown open to the modern university. As late as 1858 I visited 



32 

the copper mines on the south side of Lake Superior, then in 
the infancy of their immense activity. Great blocks of pure 
copper mixed with spikes of pure silver, you might say, lying 
loose on the ground, if a man knew how to find it ! 

To my grief, not to say to my disgust, I found that most of the 
active engineers in those works were Frenchmen, or Germans, or 
Swiss, who had been educated in foreign polytechnic schools, or 
in the mines of Europe. I know that when I came home to the 
seaboard, I used to say to every spirited youngster whom I met, 
it is the business of the young American to make States. And 
if one and another asked me how he was to go to work, I would 
bid him become a mining engineer. Well, at that moment, there 
were in America men w^hose voices could be heard and who looked 
well into the future with the true American spirit of prophecy. 
Even at that moment such men were endowing schools for mining 
which have given us long since the first directors of mines in the 
world. We should not find that our young men are going to 
learn that business in Europe to-day. We should not find that 
the directors of industry who give us our gold and silver, and 
lead, and iron, and tin, and nickel, and zinc, to-day, go to Frei- 
berg to find out how. There is a good concrete instance, of the 
manner in which fifty years has been enough to revolutionize in 
one single department the work of the university. It would be 
easy to give a dozen more instances of the same kind, reaching 
as far, requiring as broad range of studies, but let this for a mo- 
ment serve as an indicatiton of the way in which such seminaries 
as Princeton, William and Mary, and Columbia, as Yale and 
Harvard, have had to widen their field and extend their duty as 
the century went by. 

And let no man venture to say now that the great advances 
have been made by accident that, as Paley would have said, peo- 
ple pick up gold repeating watches in a heap of pebbles in Sa- 
hara. The great advances of the century have been won by the 
well-trained men of the century. Mr. Edison would tell us that 
for his inventions he would have been nowhere but for the studies 
of the scientific men on the theory of electricity. They would 
tell you at Schenectady that their giant advances from which 
they send their engineers over the world to-day where the world 
wants power and light, are advances started by the men of the 
schools who worked out the theory of them in their closets. 

The college degree tells the truth at last. It is a I)achelor of 
arts whom the college gives to the world, or a master of arts. 
The parchment saj^s so. In my day it said he was a '"Master of 
Arts" because he was a master of two languages, or possibly, in a 
slight way, of the mathematics. 



33 

I will not be tempted into the well-tilled field where men dis- 
cuss, generally from their own recollection, the value of Greek or 
logic, or mathematics, as gymnastics, as they are called. At an- 
other time with another purpose I would go into that dainty 
tournament with as much spirit as another. But now I speak 
simply as to what this nation wants and what God wants it to 
have. It wants leaders, and that means it wants men. It wants 
the leadership of men who believe in the year 1904 more than they 
believe in the year 1178 the leadership of men who care more for 
the copper of Lake Superior, for the iron of Alabama, for the 
sugar cane of a Cuban plantation, than they care for the second 
Council or a battle of Tiberias. This age does not want, how- 
ever, that their leaders sholl be rule-of- thumb men. It does 
not want that they shall stumble upon their discoveries. No! 
For it does not choose to be ruined by their failures. James Fer- 
guson, poor fellow, working his way up from the hoe, hit on 
the law of the lever ; that the power of him who uses it increases 
with the length of the crow-bar and its distance from the ful- 
crum. He thought that he had discovered this. Poor Ferguson 
thought he was the apostle of a new truth, just like those apostles 
to-day who teach as novelties what they have not hit upon in the 
Sermon on the Mount, though it was there. We mean to give 
those Fergusons a better chance. We mean that they also shall 
be able to use the treasures of the five thousand and ten thou- 
sand centuries of the world's history — five million or ten million, 
if you choose to call it so. A great director of industry said to 
me that a boy could learn well how to place a rivet on a boiler 
plate in the first twelve hours after he had been set to this work. 
^'What is the use," said he, "of keeping him two years on a boiler 
simply because you want cheap labor there?" They sent 
a lad without a beard from our technological school into a great* 
manufactory of textile fabrics in New England. He had not been 
there a month before his knowledge of alkalis and acids and 
reagents and the rest, had saved them more than would be his 
salary in a hundred years. The habit which the modern scientific 
institute gives of asking why and answering the question — the 
habit which enlarges the man and compels him to look forward 
rather than backward — it is this habit which makes what John 
Adams called a Liberal Education. 

They tell a charming story in the university which has taught 
us so much, which General Armstrong and his distinguished suc- 
cessor. Doctor Frissell, have founded at Hampton. It is a lesson 
for us all. They had a youngster there who had inherited, I 
suppose, the careless habits of long generations, among which 
perhaps every ancestor had that happy-go-lucky trick of careless- 



34 

ness as to detail — that trick of neglecting little things. Suck 
men can not brush their hair. They put the fifth button in the- 
sixth buttonhole. They have never learned the hymn which says — 

"To thee there's nothing large appears; 
Great God! there's nothing small." 

if they had learned it they did not believe it. Well, this young- 
ster annoyed every teacher he had. He annoyed the drillmaster 
because at "present arms" he could not hold his musket just 
two inches from his nose. He annoyed the English composition, 
people because to him it was all one whether you spelt ''cat"^ 
with a "k" or a "c." He annoyed the Chaplain because whea 
everyone else was in decorous silence he came in late at prayers. 
But his turn cam^ round in the machine shop. He had a rod of 
iron given him and he was directed to file it and polish it till it 
should just fit a certain round hole in a certain steel plate, pre- 
pared for it. For the first time he found out that a thousandth 
part of an inch may be as important as an inch or a cubit. This 
is to find out, if you please, that the differential of a hyperbole 
will give the law for a whole orbit of a century. It is to find out, 
if you please, that the baby born to an Alaskan Indian is as 
sure of God's infinite love as the archangel Raphael. In that 
discovery he found out what / am means, what truth is ; he found 
out what the prophet learned when God said to him, "What dost 
thou see?" and he answered reverently and humbly "I see a 
plumb line." » 

And so we might bring up illustration on illustration as to 
what is to enlarge the life of the youngster, boy or girl, whom, 
we have in hand. Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, or calyx, sta- 
men, pistil, petal or acid, alkali, agent, reagent, or corn, wheat,^ 
barley, oats — range far afield. This is the duty of the university, 
observe. University, University. It is not a ward meeting for 
which you prepare men. God knows it is not a synod nor a con- 
clave, nor a council. It is to the universe which you look up — 
this is a University. Range far afield and gather your lessons 
everywhere. And never discourage by any of your traditions 
the natural apetite of every child of God. The child of God is 
reaching into the Infinite. He is living not for to-day, not for 
to-morrow, but for eternity. And because this is life, he is always 
asking questions. Who? Why? When? Where? 

What then — and this shall be our last question — "what doth 
the Lord, our God, require of us?" The answer is given in the 
same breath, "To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
with our God." Yes ; that is simple and easy to repeat, but where 



35 

and how are we to walk with God as humbly as with him in the 
year 1904, in the favored land called the United States of Ameri- 
ca, between ocean and ocean, spanning between north and south, 
and squaring the parallels of latitude. I see and hear a good 
deal of such praise as if our wisdom or our forethought had given 
to us these advantages, had given to our women diamonds of 
Africa, had given to our merchants gold from Ormuz and from 
Inde and the Klondike — had made fellah, and coolie, and shiek 
to work out our command, had obtained gold and silver to fall 
into our treasuries. One is a little jealous when at the Fourth of 
July or on Thanksgiving Day he meets with a gale of such self- 
satisfied breezes. One is tempted to say who lifts the water till 
it congeals into rain? who piles up the treasures of the oceans on 
the tops of the mountains, who bids the mountain cascade, or 
river, or waterfall turn your spindles as it drives your turbines, 
or swings your trip-hammers? who laid your nuggets of gold 
where you found them, your cliffs of iron where you might hew 
them ; who smoothed your prairies for you and carted in upon 
them their phosphates ; who distilled your oxj^gen for you and en- 
riches your soil with nitrogen? The universit}^ which makes a 
reverent answer to these questions is lifting from drudgery into 
life every boy whom it teaches, every pupil whom that boy is 
to receive in his log school house. 

And this is the lesson by which these boys and girls are to be 
enlarged and come to the status of men and women. It is very 
likely that they do not learn that lesson when you teach them 
that nine times nine is eighty-one. It is ver}'- possible that they 
do not learn this lesson when you teach them how to spell. They 
will not learn it, indeed, if you limit yourself to the duties of in- 
structors and that poor business of piling up a hundred facts 
where but for you there would have been but fifty. You do. not 
make a man or woman by instructing them; not until you edu- 
cate them, until you bring them out of the miry region of the 
things that perish and let them know something of the realities 
which are eternal. You have to lift them from the mud, smoke, 
and dust of yesterday and the earth and to carry them upward 
and forward into the pure ether of the unstained life. I do not 
say to-morrow only, but of the eternities. 

As I said, John Adams, when he spoke of a Liberal Education, 
was not talking of languages or of the metaphysics of the Dark 
Ages. He meant an education broad enough to make whatever 
American citizen a companion of whatever man. There is an 
amusing paper by Franklin in which he tells what kings he has 
stood before, because he was diligent in his business. Franklin 
could not have talked with those kings, he could not have taught 



36 

them what he taught them but for the liberal education by which 
lie had promoted himself from skimming tallow in a chandlier's 
shop, to the function of teaching king's their business. 

John Adams did mean that every citizen should every day look 
upward and forward. What can I do to-day, good God, which I 
could not do yesterday? How can I come nearer to Thee than I 
ever came before? Show me how, as I never have done, I can 
lead Thy children. Thy sons and Thy daughters on a pathway 
nobler and higher? Here am I; send me. 

The gentlemen around me are much better fitted than I am 
to extend such suggestions, practically, so that we could trace 
them in detail. I have no right to attempt such service. 
They are carrying out such duty in the daily work of their several 
chairs ; and our new president, day and night will be finding for 
us new lines of endeavor in which How^ard University shall en- 
gage them. The word of practical advice which is to be given is 
very simple. It does not so much address duties to these who 
teach and to the President of the University who encourages 
them, as it does for us and for men like us. We, the People of 
the United States, have a special business in the affair. We, the 
People of the United States, who are lavish in the expenses of 
instruction have it for our duty now to build upon that under- 
ground foundation. We have it for our duty to educate the men 
and women whom we have taught to spell, to read, to add, and to 
subtract. For that business my receipe is a short one. I could 
send it over the wires at the low ten-word rate and not pass be- 
yond my limit. I think that We, the People of the United States, 
ought to compel the Congress, which is among our servants, to 
build one battleship the less and distribute the |10,000,000 w-hich 
we thus gain, among the ten States, with this District, which 
need most such universities as this which has brought us together, 
Howard University, Hampton College, the Atlanta University, 
Tuskegee and Snow Hill, and the rest; each one of them will tell 
you how it can expend its share. 



37 



Rev. Teunis S. Hamlin, D. D. 

The Reverend Tennis S. Hamlin, D.D., President of the Board of 
Trustees of the University, on behalf of the Board, delivered the 
keys and charter to the President of the University and said : 

Howard University was incorporated by Act of Congress ap- 
proved March 2, 1867. It is therefore thirty-seven years old. It 
is defined in the charter to be "for the education of youth in the 
liberal arts and sciences.'^ It is thus without limitation as to 
race or sex. It has always been co-educational, and its pupils 
have been chiefly Negroes. Though its fundamental law was 
wisely made very broad, it was intended to minister to the Freed- 
men; and that intention has been carried out through these 
thirty-seven years. 

Its influence, however, has gone far beyond the Negroes of this 
country. Men and women from Africa, China, Japan, Korea, and 
other Oriental lands, and within recent years many from Cuba 
and Porto Rico have enjoyed its advantages. We believe it has 
a very important mission to our island possessions; that in no 
other way can the interests of the Filipinos be more advanced 
than by the education here of their best young men. Thus their 
coming leaders would learn American institutions at their very 
centre, and see free government where it is best adapted to stimu- 
late genuine and intelligent patriotism. 

The departments provided for in our charter are six — Normal, 
Collegiate, Theological, Law, Medicine, Agriculture. Only the 
last has never been organized. We hope, however, that the day is 
near when Congress will put this territory called ''the District 
of Columbia," on a par with other national units in the matter " 
of agricultural education, and thus afford this University the 
means and opportunity to realize the full scope of the institution, 
as originally designed. 



38 

Meanwhile, through the generous aid of the Congress, and of 
many friends in all parts of the country, the University has af- 
forded opportunity of the best education to some sixteen thou- 
sand students. It has had a succession. of able Presidents, and of 
learned and faithful teachers in all its faculties. The ministers, 
physicians, and lawj^ers whom it has trained are to-day leaders 
in a great number of communities, where their influence is uni- 
formly on the side of law, morality, and civic virtue. We have 
sent out an army of teachers, trained and equipped for their in- 
dispensible work, who are not only keeping good schools, but giv- 
ing influential examples of what good schools can be, and so 
raising the general' level of teaching over wide areas. 

And we are giving the higher academic education to young men 
and women brought to it by natural selection, and capable of dis- 
tinguishing themselves as scholars in all the arts and sciences. 
It is matter of gratification and hope that, despite their great 
historic handicap, the Negroes are producing notable mathema- 
ticians, linguists, scientists, poets, novelists, musicians, artists; 
in short, men and women capable of the highest attainments. 

Howard University stands distinctly for the higher education, 
in which respect it has no peer among the schools of our country 
for colored youth. It believes in the training of the whole 
man; therefore in industrial education, for which it hopes 
to make ampler provision. But this is not as the chief or 
final thing. Only as a valuable means to the great end of a 
thoroughly liberal scholarship. To the best colored youth we as- 
pire to give the best education, in order that Howard alumni may 
be everywhere recognized as scholars, equipped in both theoreti- 
cal and practical ways to be the safe, wise, courageous, patriotic 
leaders of their race. We look for the day— the not distant day 
— when a degree from Howard will afford to the world the same 
guarantee of accomplishment as a degree from Harvard or Yale. 

Dr. Gordon, on the 26th of May last, the Board of Trustees 
unanimously and very heartily chose you President of this Uni- 
versity. We were well assured of your scholarship, high charac- 
ter, and experience as an educator. On the 15th of Septeanber 
you entered upon your work. The intervening time has been 
brief, but we have noted with increasing satisfaction your indus^* 
try and fidelity, your broad views of your opportunity and re- 
sponsibility, and the high favor that you have won from your 
teachers and pupils. It is therefore with the greatest satisfaction 
and the brightest hopes that we now formally inaugurate you as 
President, and commit to your custody the charter and the keys 



39 

of the University. We charge you to maintain firm and kind 
discipline; to labor without stint for the elevation of the stand- 
ard of study and teaching ; to watch over your pupils as though 
they were your own children. No man could ask a nobler place 
of labor and influence than is yours ; we are entirely sure that you 
will fill it, ever seeking Divine help and guidance, with wisdom, 
energy, industry, and success. 



40 



President Gordon. 

President Gordon then delivered his inaugural address as 
follows : 

Mr. President, Members of the Board of Trustees, Members of 
the Faculties and Student Body of Howard University, and 
Ladies and Gentlemen : — In accepting this trust, which the Pres- 
ident of the Board of Trustees has so gracefully placed in my 
hands, I must express my appreciation of the honor done me ; not 
only of the mode in which it is consummated to-day, but also 
of the various steps by which God has led us to this point. You 
have placed in my hands the keys of Howard University, 
which were carried in turn by the Rev. Charles B. Boynton, D. D., 
the Rev. Byron Sunderland, D. D., that soldierly founder of 
schools and colleges. Gen. Oliver O. Howard ; the Hon. Edward P. 
Smith ; that able executive. Dr. William W. Patton ; that grace- 
ful scholar and poet, Dr. Jeremiah Eames Rankin, my predeces- 
sors, and yourself and other acting Presidents — men all notable 
for faith and achievement. 

As I receive them it occurs to me that in the changes of the 
centuries keys which have been used so largely for one of their 
functions — that of locking fetters on slaves, and sealing prison 
doors, and making depositories of learning safe as against those 
who would break in, and fastening the gates of nations as against 
the coming of barbaric hordes, and locking up religion and its 
privileges as against the uncircumcised and unclean — are now 
used rather for another of their purposes — that of unlocking fet- 
ters, and prison doors, and abodes of learning, and city gates, 
and churches — in the hope that one day all doors and gates may 
be unlocked and through wide open doorways' the King of 
Glory may come in. 

I take it you mean me to use these keys for the purpose of un^ 
locking — what shall I say? — oh, so many things. For six months 
I have lived on University Hill, which faces full and fair that 
other hill where proudly stands the Senate House of the nation. 



41 

It has seemed to me significant that the Capitol and Howard Uni- 
versity face each the other. The one has the power of the na- 
tion. The other, the University, has the powder of the keys, w^hich 
is the power of opening, and you know that many an old rusty 
look still waits the application of the keys. Look around and you 
will see ten millions of people locked out — standing on the out- 
side of things. See not only this patient race itself barred out, 
but also schoolhouses, high schools, colleges, and universities 
locked up lest they break in. See even the resources of learning 
padlocked as against the Negro, lest, attaining the blessings of 
culture, he, being solitary, lose himself in imagination in the 
witchery of the Midsummer Night's Dream, or from time to time 
abandon his cares and go to the land of the Lotos, where it is 
always afternoon. 

Sirs, you do w^ell to give some one the power of the keys to go 
up and down and unlock, and unlock, and unlock until he shall 
have unlocked every fountain from which learning flows, and 
every closet, to the very last where it is hidden. For men utterly 
err when they think they can throw wide two or three doors in 
the halls of learning and leave the rest closed as against any 
human being. Let anyone but sit for a time in the very low^- 
est room of this feast, and, be it sooner or be it later, openly or 
surreptiously, as a son of the house or a thief in the night, unless 
jou unlock the higher rooms he will break their locks and rifle 
them of their treasures. 

There have been only two logical positions as to the relation 
of the Negro and learning. One was that which prevailed so long 
in so many States and which made it unlawful to teach him 
even the alphabet. If that was what was wanted it was a good 
law and could be executed. But if not, and the schoolmaster be 
allowed to teach him the alphabet, you can not stop a man at any 
line you may draw until he shall have reached, if he have the 
ability, the content of human knowledge. If you do not w^ant 
him to ^o to the limit, forbid him the alphabet. Give him the alpha- 
bet, and those twenty-sis magic characters will unite and reunite 
in more and more complicated combinations until from them shall 
have proceeded the whole of human knowledge. I do not know 
that there is any special potency in A, and yet there is, for A 
means also B. and A, B, C involves, before one can stop, X, Y. Z 
and these in their turn, etc., w^hich means no stopping place until 
he shall have gone as far as these learned gentlemen who have 
honored us to-day with their presence and their w^ords, and as 
far as Edward Everett Hale has gone. When they taught him 
his alphabet they lost the power of saying to him ''thus far shalt 
thou go and no further." 



42 

So, when one State says the education of one class of its citi- 
zens shall end when they finish the sixth grade, or when another 
says it shall terminate with graduation from the high school and 
they shall not have collegiate educations, or when there is an 
agreement to give them only sufficient education to make them 
good farmers and mechanics and to discountenance that which 
opens the professions — those who do this do not know their own 
A, B, C's; they have only played with them. They do not know 
how, in those tinj' black dots called letters lurks a microbe, vir- 
ulent or beneficent according to your way of thinking, which 
causes in those w^hom it infects unquenchable thirst for knowl- 
edge, and a germ which when it is grown becomes the greatest 
of all trees, the tree which is in the midst of the garden, the tree 
of knowledge, the tree whose fruit makes men become as gods, 
a tree locked up in the gardens of the Hesperides and there 
guarded by moat and wall and redoubtable beings, the fame of 
which has gone far and wide and which is better than the rumor 
of it. 

Very well. Thirty-seven years ago, there were some who said 
the work we did is but half done. We have unlocked the shackles ; 
now we will unlock the halls of learning and the freed man shall 
be made free of the republic of learning. We will found institu- 
tions of higher learning which he may enter. I fear me that many 
who have not kept in touch with the events of the past few years^ 
are now saying, condescendingly, those were good men, well- 
meaning men, but impracticable, and their hope has failed and 
that race must remain hewers of wood and drawers of water^ 
their utmost possible to become farmers and mechanics. Nay, 
they were great men, far-seeing men. 

They founded colleges and universities, many of them. I have 
not time to name them all, and may be pardoned if, to-night, I 
speak of only one, that in whose honor this distinguished as- 
semblage is gathered, Howard University. Thirty-seven years 
and twenty-eight days ago it was incorporated. Thirty-seven 
years and twenty-eight days after Harvard was founded, and the 
same time after Yale was founded, how many graduates had they, 
respectively, sent out? How many physicians, how many law- 
yers, how many ministers? Howard has already graduated over 
two thousand men and women, of whom two hundred are minis- 
ters, two hundred are lawyers, and seven hundred are physicians, 
and its students come from a race which forty years ago was just 
having its emancipation day. Was an equal record ever made, 
save by two or possibly three of the great educational foundations 
of the last fifty years? When you reflect on the constituency, its 



43 

poverty, its heredity, its environment, all its handicap, I challenge 
the world to find eqnal achievement. 

These facts mean at least this : That this race is capable of 
receiving the higher education, and that the founders of Howard 
University were right in saying we will give them higher educa- 
tion ; which involves, to approach a much controverted point, 
sufficient breadth of view to include as part of it, manual training 
as a means, not as an end — manual training as Cornell Univer- 
sity has it, and as Columbia University has it, with splendid, cost- 
ly equipment and pedagogic instruction ; not to make mechanics, 
which is the function of a trade school, which a manual training 
school is not, nor to make farmers, which is the work of an 
agricultural college, but as the university has it to make master 
mechanics, teachers of farmer's institutes, the men of trained 
hands and brains who shall become the leaders of labor. In that 
proportion I stand for it at Howard University, and because 
manual training has an educational value it must be given a great 
place in our work, alwaj's remembering that it is for that reason 
and not because our constituency is adapted to that alone, for 
it is not. 

The constituency to which Howard addresses itself is not an 
entire race. It is the exceptional members, the fraction of the 
race, those who are capable of receiving the higher education, 
those who are to be its group leaders. I care not what the cen- 
tury, nor what the country, nor what the race cited as an illus- 
tration. Everywhere, always, and amongst all men, peoples have 
risen not because the submerged masses, the millions, were lifted 
bodily by regenerating forces exerted either from without or from 
within, for no nation has ever been rich enough, or powerful 
enough, to educate and raise its working class as a whole, but be- 
cause there came in it one or more, or all, of these classes, 
preachers, poets, statesmen, generals, admirals, lawyers, physi- 
cians, teachers, editors, scientists, captains of industry, merchant 
princes, master mechanics, labor leaders, composing together a 
fractional part of the whole mass, which then raised the sub- 
merged remainder. 

It is to produce these leaders who will themselves dig their race 
out of the Slough of Despond that Howard exists. That there 
will be an increasing necessity for a university for these, no one 
who has studied the situation doubts. Unless China is wrong in 
supporting the Imperial University at Pekin, and unless the Mo- 
hammedan world is wrong in supporting its university at Cairo, 
and unless England is wrong in supporting its universities af Ox- 
ford and Cambridge, and unless Germany is wrong in supporting 
Berlin and its other universities, and unless the whole education- 



44 

al system of the world is wrong, the Government of the United 
States is right in offering to these exceptional members of a race 
as the capstone of their educational institutions a university lo- 
cated at the national capital. This is indisputable, that a man 
should be given the opportunity of going as far as he is able to go. 
Howard has been right and is right, and will continue to be 
pedagogically right in existing as a university and holding uni- 
versity standards. 

And wherein does the university standard consist? Not pri- 
marily in the curriculum. What is fundamental in a university 
amongst the three essentials of faculties, curriculum and equip- 
ment is the man rather than the theory, the curriculum rather 
than the material plant. When President Gilman was given the 
task of organizing Johns Hopkins, and w^hen later President Har- 
per undertook the organization of the Chicago University, they 
sought the world over for the ablest professors, and finding such 
made those universities everlastingly famous. Why, sirs, you 
know very well that more than once it has happened in Germany, 
where the university is at its best, that the deaths of two or 
three professors, aye, even of one, has reduced an institution to 
second or third place amongst universities, although curriculum 
and plant remained as before, because it seemed to the whole 
school that the school master being dead the school was dead. 

So the primary need, not overlooking curriculum and plant that 
will measure up to university standards, is men to teach the 
courses and use the plant. Howard, which has been and is not- 
able for its teaching force, will continue to demand, as professor- 
ships increase and new professors are placed in them, that they 
measure up to the standards of university professors, which in- 
volves, in addition to I'^nusual intellectual abilitj' and a talent for 
imparting knowledge, power, force, manhood and commanding 
personality. If greatness of character is called for in all uni- 
versities, it is absolutely demanded at Howard, where the condi- 
tions require men of majestic characters able to produce giants, 
tall men, men like cathedrals, for only a master man can beget an 
intellectual progeny of master men. 

Such men must be sought carefully, toilfully, far and wide, 
and when found compelled to come, and, I fancy, of all the duties 
devolving upon the President of Howard University the most vi- 
tal is to find and introduce such men to the Board of Trustees. 
Let this be done and one and another large-hearted, ODen-hauded 
man and woman will say, men of that calibre must have work- 
shops, and laboratories, and books, and apparatus, and salaries, 
and so the vacant building sites on the campus, which should be 
a standing temptation to givers, will be built upon and the en- 

T.. Of 0« 



dowment provided for. Then the professors will create courses 
of studj; and the curriculum will be provided for. Yes, certainly; 
the men will draw the rest, plant and curriculum. All this be- 
cause whoever caters intellectually to the exceptional fraction 
must be himself an exceptional man, and the institution which 
caters to it must be an exceptional institution, which is much the 
same as saying a university where any man can find instruction 
in any subject that lies between manual training on the extreme 
right and the professions on the extreme left. 

Wherefore location at the capital of the United States, history 
—and what history there has been in giving the black man the 
highest education— has been largely of our making, manifest 
destiny^which is even now drawing to Howard voung men from 
Cuba, Porto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, Japan, and I know not 
how many other tropical islands, and from South America, and 
from Europe, Asia, and Africa— the directing hand of God, and 
many another indication suggest to me that all things conspire to 
make Howard University the university of the colored races of 
all the continents. 

Mr. President of the Board of Trustees, and ladies and "gentle^ 
men, these considerations sober me as I realize the difficulties in- 
volved in finding and bringing hither great men, exceptional edu- 
cators, lovers of their fellow men, of the stuff of which martyrs are 
made, that they involve many new buildings and adequate endow- 
ments, at least one million immediately, so that its permanence 
may be secured, whatever temporary changes of sentiment of 
epochs of indifference, or even of opposition, may come. Yet all 
this is a challenge, and when the glove is thrown down there is 
always someone to take it up. So I feel that amongst the many 
who are living for their fellow-men, their country, and their God 
there are Christian patriots who will recognize the splendor of 
this challenge and who will answer back, "This is what I have 
been looking for; this is my opportunity to do something which 
will make for my country and my fellowmen; this is a mission- 
ary work telling through the ages upon whole continents ;"' and I 
am sure that we shall find notable educators who will dedicate 
themselves, and large-hearted, open-handed men and women who 
will dedicate their estates to the work of making Howard the 
university of all the colored races of all the islands and all the 
continents. 

So, sir, I accept this great trust at your hands, boasting not 
myself of w^hat can be done, but pledging myself, with a mind 
concentrated upon this task to the exclusion of all else, to go 
whithersoever the duties of this office call, turning neither to the 
right hand nor to the left, refusing to be diverted to any side is- 



46 

sues, and influenced always bj the counsels of the Honorable 
Secretary of the Interior, the representative of the Government, 
and of this distinguished Board of Trustees, and of my learned 
colleagues of these faculties. 

This all in earnest determination to administer in all fidelity 
the charter granted by the Congress of the United States, a 
charter admirable in its provisions and which time has proved to 
be another of the great charters of human liberties because it in- 
sures intellectual freedom and citizenship in the republic of 
learning to whoever — whatever the creed, the race, or the sex — 
would come out of the bondage of ignorance into the liberty of 
knowledge; a charter to be forever venerated because H confers 
solemn charter rights inestimable, potent. 

Hence I accept these keys, that I may execute this charter. And 
I do so believing utterly that this problem, as it is called, of the 
Negro demands a solution which shall be satisfactory to the Ne- 
gro himself, and which We, the People of the United States, shall 
heartily accept, and that it will not be solved by any one man 
or group of men, nor by any educational theory formulated to 
meet his case alone, but by the united efforts of all of us, bring- 
ing to bear upon it in a sane, business-like way those regenerat- 
ing forces which have proved potent in solving every problem 
that has so far been solved. 

Education as the term is understood by the consensus of opin- 
ion of all educators, and that love to God and love to man incul- 
cated by Jesus Christ, our Lord. 



47 

The following letter was received from the President of the 
United States : 

White House, 
Washington, March 29, 1904- 
My Dear Doctor Hamlin : — Permit me through you to extend 
to President Gordon and to Howard University my congratula- 
tions on this occasion. I wnsh I could be with you in person, for 
I appreciate to the full all the work that Howard University has 
done for the education and uplifting of our colored fellow-Ameri- 
cans, whose struggle for spiritual and intellectual development is 
of necessity so difficult and often so painful. 
Again congratulating you, I am, 

Very sincerely yours, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Rev. Teunis S. Hamlin^ 

President of Board of Trustees, Howard University, 

1316 Connecticut Avenue. 



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